Hannah Arendt
and the 20th Century

How does one orga­nize and struc­ture the wealth of infor­ma­tion in such a way that vis­i­tors feel the desire and inspi­ra­tion to explore this diver­si­ty of life and thought? How does one cre­ate an atmos­phere capa­ble of trans­port­ing Arendt’s life and per­son­al­i­ty into space dur­ing her time? Two film rooms and numer­ous inter­spersed audio clips help vis­i­tors repeat­ed­ly approach Han­nah Arendt’s ideas with their sens­es. The leg­endary 1964 inter­view with Gün­ther Gaus and numer­ous audio record­ings are help­ful in this regard. Orig­i­nal pho­tographs of her cir­cle of friends, per­son­al items such as her cig­a­rette case and brief­case, her neck­lace, her dis­tinc­tive brooch, cloth­ing, fur­ni­ture, and Jew­ish arti­facts com­plete the picture.

For the Ger­man Muse­um of Mod­ern Art (DHM), chezweitz is con­struct­ing a spa­tial struc­ture on two floors that orga­nizes a tour along the point­ed­ly devel­oped themes. The result is a built, walk­a­ble, three-dimen­sion­al net­work that opens up excit­ing spaces, diverse ref­er­ences, and per­spec­tives. The sub­tle use of graph­ics and media enables an exhi­bi­tion design that gives space to the seri­ous­ness of the themes while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly allow­ing a very per­son­al view of Han­nah Arendt as a person.

The exhi­bi­tion design takes into account the ground lev­el and the acces­si­bil­i­ty of exhibits and facil­i­ties to ensure unre­strict­ed access for vis­i­tors in wheel­chairs. Numer­ous audio nooks allow for an aur­al expe­ri­ence of almost all areas of the exhi­bi­tion. One-hand­ed head­phones at many points are sup­ple­ment­ed by hands-on ses­sions with tran­scrip­tions of the audio con­tri­bu­tions. The video instal­la­tions with film con­tri­bu­tions on Han­nah Arendt are sub­ti­tled in Ger­man and English.

The cen­tral exhib­it and first per­spec­tive in the exhi­bi­tion will be the mod­el of Cre­ma­to­ri­um II in the Auschwitz-Birke­nau exter­mi­na­tion camp by the Pol­ish artist Mieczysław Sto­bier­s­ki, which, relo­cat­ed and re-enact­ed, ties in with what con­stant­ly moved Han­nah Arendt: the crimes against humanity.

The sceno­graph­ic spa­tial struc­ture as a net has been dis­solved for the sec­ond exhi­bi­tion venue, the Bun­deskun­sthalle in Bonn, as the exhi­bi­tion space is designed in a ring shape. Nev­er­the­less, the scenog­ra­phy suc­ceeds in main­tain­ing impor­tant ref­er­ences through open­ings and vis­tas. The orig­i­nal focal point, the mod­el of the cre­ma­to­ri­um in Auschwitz, could not be brought to Bonn.

Thus, chezweitz, togeth­er with Ste­fan Hur­tig, cre­at­ed a com­plex video instal­la­tion that trans­ports the essen­tial con­tent and emo­tions to Bonn in an inter­est­ing way. We cap­ture the enor­mous, all-round mod­el from dif­fer­ent posi­tions and dis­tances using a slow cam­era pan and install it as a three-part video instal­la­tion, cre­at­ing a caesura in the space.

The par­tic­u­lar chal­lenge of the exhi­bi­tion at the Lit­er­aturhaus München, the third stop, was to trans­fer the exten­sive exhi­bi­tion and com­plex archi­tec­ture into a sig­nif­i­cant­ly small­er space than at the pre­vi­ous stops. By cre­at­ing a uni­fied hori­zon and enclos­ing the columns in the exhi­bi­tion space of the Lit­er­aturhaus München, a dis­tinc­tive, focused scenog­ra­phy emerges that, through numer­ous visu­al con­nec­tions and links, trans­lates the life and thought of Han­nah Arendt into archi­tec­ture. As a cen­tral ele­ment, vis­i­ble from every­where, a cor­ri­dor in Munich rad­i­cal­ly cuts through the exhi­bi­tion archi­tec­ture and marks the caesura that Auschwitz rep­re­sents for Han­nah Arendt’s work.